There's No Such Thing as Having Your Sh*t Together

Internet lifestyle gurus exist specifically to make normal people feel terrible about themselves. These glamorous bloggers and Instagrammers aren’t even real people. They’re all androids designed to be relentlessly, disgustingly perfect in every way. Most of us are guilty of admiring their well-lit photos and watching their vlogs, and we should stop buying into their shiny fake lifestyle.

Real people rarely have their s**t together. We pledge to become morning people, to get more exercise, eat more greens, meditate, smile more, wash your face every day, stop picking up dirty clothes off the floor and wearing them a third day because they don’t smell “that bad.” But it’s not easy. Women especially have this incredible pressure to always look put together and awake. We get up at the crack of dawn to straighten our hair and hide our dark circles and put together an outfit that looks good but doesn’t look like we spent too much time planning it out, because too much effort is uncool. These standards have existed for a million years, but only recently have things gotten out of control.

How long does it take to arrange that?

Self-proclaimed lifestyle gurus document their perfection on social media for all of us to see and feel bad about. They get up at 4 a.m. and spend an hour meditating before they make a healthy vegan acai smoothie bowl filled with “superfoods” that most people have never heard of. Then they go to the gym for an hour of exercise and then they give themselves a full makeover and manicure before they wake up their well-behaved children and feed them a nutritious, unprocessed, sugar-free breakfast and send them off to school. This leaves them the rest of the day to work on their novel, update their blog, make a vlog about their blog, do a photoshoot for Instagram, do yoga on the beach, drink six gallons of water, put together some fun DIY crafts, rearrange their collection of succulent plants, write in their gratitude journal and plan a Pinterest-worthy wedding for their bestie. Then they settle in for a full eight hours of sleep and do it all again the next day.

These people are beautiful and inhumanly productive and they are exhausting to watch and most importantly, they are insane. Most of us are lucky if we’re able to drag ourselves out of bed before 8 a.m. and remember to brush our teeth before we eat a Pop-Tart in the car on the way to work. You sit at your desk all day and do as much as you can while you daydream about going back to bed. You might go to the gym once in awhile, you probably count at least 20 ounces of coffee as your daily water intake, your shoes probably don’t match your belt and the one time you had a house plant it died because you forgot to recite positive mantras to it every night. There’s nothing wrong with that. Be normal.

Smoothies are delicious but they are not a f***ing meal. Leftover pizza is the real breakfast of champions. Yoga is hard and kind of miserable and sometimes overrated. Mason jars are only for pickling things and drinking coffee out of, not for excessively decorating your home. Bags under your eyes are a badge of honor. Being too hungover to get out of bed and put on pants is not a crime. Sometimes you have to spend your entire afternoon doing absolutely nothing. Watching Netflix until it asks you if you’re still alive is totally okay. Having your s**t together is a myth. No one is productive every day. No one can eat super healthy for every single meal. Some of us let the unread emails pile up and some of us are late to work at least once a week because getting out of bed is really hard sometimes.

Internet lifestyle gurus are two-dimensional posers with no grip on reality. Either they really do all the stupid crap they claim to do and are utterly miserable and alone (and definitely do not sleep), or they’ve created an elaborate illusion of how they spend their time and they’re really sitting on the kitchen floor eating raw brownie batter with a spoon while they upload their photo of neatly arranged avocado slices on gluten-free toast. Netflix and brownie batter are the true keys to happiness in this world, not organized shelves and Instagram followers. Embrace your own mediocrity.

Filling The Void

VOID MAGAZINE is a free, full-color monthly magazine focused on North Florida's culture. You’ll find in-depth stories about health, fitness, surf, skate, music, art, fishing and other North Florida ways of life. If you are interested in advertising, please contact us.